Over the past few seasons, scary movies has frequently explored toxic romance with the same fervor as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (Together) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's clear that romantic relationships are mostly gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a secluded location together signifies a fresh level of terror.
So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we learn quickly has signified the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as filled with red flags or as suspiciously perfect as other recent characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he explains some peculiarities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a creepy cousin who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They seem at ease together.
Osgood Perkins brings in discord through his shot choices, instead of subtle hostilities or backstory.
Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright hidden, but they're frequently partially blocked, viewed from strange perspectives, or framed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz thinks she hears soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply memorable superimposition of the nearby river flowing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she calls when she's left alone at the cabin. Her acquaintance inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.
For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in any number of directions, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike mix. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive run for the last year and a half with another movie scheduled next year, complicates efforts to discern, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are instances just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the tonally distinct murderer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse marketing, could make the latest release feel to some like a deceptive trick designed to embellish what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.
Perhaps it's that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it emphasizes its physical impact on an viewer over a wish to twist that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they often script toward message rather than filming for immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to push those components without permitting the movie to become abstract woo-woo self-indulgence.
The director also appears to recognize what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual virtuoso demo reel of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange things that take place around her, and the character is scripted and performed with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the hell is going on.) However Maslany provides a additional layer to her acting in her unguarded moments: a cynical glance of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her painful history is revealed, the figure still feels fully realized.
That's true of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines seem satisfying, correct and improbable to generate a sequel. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell stories don't always manage: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.
- Keeper arrives in theaters on November 14th.
